Even though The Beatles announced their breakup nearly 43 years ago to the day, Freda Kelly, the subject of Hot Docs film Good Ol’ Freda, is still keeping their secrets. At least, some of them.

Kelly still won’t say which, if any, of the band members she dated. After making the leap from fan to their personal secretary 50 years ago, she has too much class to kiss and tell. “I had a soft spot for all of them,” she says diplomatically.

So who was the best kisser? “Oh, I can’t remember,” Kelly responds with a hearty laugh.

Good Ol’ Freda screens Sunday and a final time at Hot Docs Saturday. It was picked up by Magnolia Pictures last week and will likely be in theatres later this year.

Shy and soft spoken, Kelly seems hardly different than the 17-year-old Liverpool teen and Beatles fan who landed the “best job in the world” hired by Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein as personal secretary to the band for 11 years — a year longer than they were even officially together. She also ran the fan club, keeping Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison busy signing autographs, donating snips of hair or a shirt to be cut into squares and mailed to devoted teens around the world whenever they were in the office.

All that changed when the exploding popularity of the band led “Eppie” (Epstein) to replace hand-written autographs with a stamp. Kelly didn’t approve of a watered-down experience for the fans. “John didn’t want it either,” she says.

Not only did she rarely talk about her past in the intervening years, Kelly brushed off pleas to tell her story for decades from those who did know who she was. “There’s too many bloody books out there,” she’d say.

But director Ryan White (Pelada) finally helped the reclusive Kelly’s story come to light thanks to a long-time family friendship through his uncle, Billy Kingsley of Beatles contemporaries, The Merseybeats, who also appears in the doc. Kelly decided she would okay the project because she wanted to leave a legacy for her grandson, Niall Timothy, age three. The stories she shares onscreen came as a surprise to many who thought they knew her, including her family.

“I just want him to see how much fun and laughter I had in the ‘60s,” says Kelly. “It was a really good time and I want the film to bring that out.”

Photos, interviews, film clips and fan club memorabilia, plus four Beatles tracks amid rock classics of the time, help frame Kelly’s remembrances of the birth of Beatlemania. As both a fan and insider, Kelly was perfectly placed to help oil the publicity machine in a far simpler time of celebrity culture, when a teen could send a photo or autograph to her favourite Beatle and get it mailed back, signed and perhaps with a personal note tucked inside the envelope.

“Maybe I was in the right place at the right time,” suggests Kelly a few hours before Good Ol’ Freda had its Hot Docs premiere Saturday. “Or maybe he (Epstein) saw something. I don’t know. In those days you didn’t sign anything there was no employment law. You just knew you could trust people.”

The “right place” Kelly was in was The Cavern Club, a warehouse cellar in Liverpool now famous as the birthplace of The Beatles. Kelly, who was working as a secretary nearby, spent hours there listening to the fledgling band, coming out with the distinctive smell of the subterranean club clinging to her clothes.

Once she landed the job, making just over five pounds weekly, Kelly became privy to all the band’s secrets - like who was married (Lennon) or getting married (Harrison). She never blabbed, even when offered bribes by local newspapers.

Kelly also became close to The Beatles’ families, drinking with McCartney’s father “Uncle Jim” or spending time with Starr’s mother, Elsie. “I went to all the christenings and weddings,” she says fondly.

Yet despite being such a private person, Kelly revels in talking to Beatles fans after screenings of Good Ol’ Freda.

“They’re nice, aren’t they?” says Kelly, who is still working as a secretary in Liverpool, in a law office. “They just want to talk to you and ask you a few questions.”

And pro that she is, she’s especially pleased to chat with a former fan club member or someone who got their autograph all those years ago, thanks to her.

“And I think, I’m so glad that letter got through.”

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